Things We Learned This Week About Music
It's just a bulleted list for your inherently beautiful human voice.
In last week’s Artistic Inspiration News, we highlighted a free 5-day songwriting challenge offered by UK-based Ian Escario, with critiques by songwriter Clare Dove. We don’t sign up for everything in the newsletter, but we signed on for this one. It was intense, and great fun, and we already shared some of the music we made on Instagram and Facebook. During the challenge and outside of it, we learned (and re-learned!) some things:
Music has been made by humans since well before the invention of tuners, the circle of fifths, the 440 hertz middle A. Music is your innate human gift. Your voice is inherently beautiful.
Singing is communication, the act of listening to another person with empathy and then gently twining your inherently beautiful natural human voice around theirs. It is as intimate as a kiss. And just as with kissing — although there are some learnable skills involved and some mistakes to be avoided — anyone can do it. Ultimately whether you do it well is a subjective matter of chemistry, context, and connection. Take that chance.
The Nashville Songwriters Association International songwriting contest score card is all by itself a pretty good Socratic-method tutorial for writing an excellent song.
Music — and movies, and art, and novels, and dance, and performance, etc. — is not made by the talented. It is not made by the creative. It is not made by the technically and artistically brilliant.
Music is made by the people who show up, those who can tolerate their anxiety well enough to arrive in and then stay in the rooms where it happens, those who are willing to make the imperfect attempt in public, those who are consistent in their practice and reliable in honoring their commitments, those with the social skills to make friends (or at least not enemies).
Recorded music is made mostly by the producer, tbh. The producer is the person to use those social skills to make good friends with. The producer is the person who makes you sound like you can sing.
They’ve combined social media with a DAW now, which means you can form a band tomorrow where the producer is Hungarian, the singer is from the UK, the guitarist is a nice Midwestern guy, and the kid with the sick beats is sitting in his car in Atlanta, rapping into his phone. You can write and record a song with your international team in a week, with everyone getting a voice. We still can’t jam in a zoom room, but if you have any interest in collaborating musically across time and space, try out BandLab.
Diversity is an artistic strength. If you can be in a room collaborating with people from all over the world, all backgrounds, all genres, you should be in that room. You won't find more fertile creative ground.
As the New Yorker used to put it, “musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives.” Be flexible and don’t get too attached to anyone’s talent when you’re collaborating. People are flaky and not always dependable. People can be jerks. This is all about their insecurities and their inability to tolerate them; it has nothing to do with you. So ignore every bit of it. Have faith that if you want to create, you can create.
Use the click track. Use the metronome. Learn to count to four. I know you think you can count to four. You can’t.
Say yes to opportunities. There are so many free opportunities online to learn new artistic skills and meet new collaborators. These opportunities will energize you. We put out Artistic Inspiration News every month so you can find amazing new experiences that will deepen you as an artist, whatever your discipline. You should subscribe. See the button? Click it.
What did you learn this week about your art? Tell us! We have a button for that, too.